Today ECO is not in the mood for jokes or puns. In yesterday’s Contact Groups on the UAE Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP), it became clear that a handful of developed countries are trying to kill the potential of the JTWP to deliver justice for workers, for communities, for peoples and for countries that need support to accelerate their transformation.
As opposed to some delegates, ECO is not confused. ECO is angry. We were clearly getting somewhere after a constructive session on Monday night. And yet, instead of taking all that work and making genuine efforts to ensure the JTWP progresses towards concrete actions on just transition, countries might be leaving Bonn with little more than a procedural trick.
We will likely leave the SB60 with no summary from the dialogue, no process to streamline the activities and to ensure that we have the discussions we need to scale and speed up just transition, and no commitment to actually deliver on anything of substance. The world needs justice and equity and what we get is an empty procedural conclusion.
ECO wants to be clear with you, dear Parties. If you answer yes to more than one of these questions, then you are part of the problem:
- Have you argued that clarifying the modalities of the UAE JTWP is a renegotiation of COP28 outcomes? (spoiler alert: it’s not!)
- Have you rejected attempts to clarify the themes to be discussed in the future?
- Have you used budgetary concerns or concerns for Non-Party Stakeholders’ participation as a reason not to add more activities to the dialogues?
- Have you said more than once that you are confused without proposing a way forward that seems acceptable to all Parties?
What we see in the JTWP discussions is what we witness in the real world: the transition is under way but justice is nowhere to be seen.
ECO strongly supports all the activists and delegates that will be fighting between now and COP29 to redress this situation and make Baku the essential stepping stone to the historic Just Transition outcome everyone needs by COP30. You all have the strength, ideas, vision and collective power to make it happen!